[105.04] A Statistical investigation of HI in the Magellanic Bridge

We present results from two statistical structural analyses
of the nearby tidal HI Bridge in the Magellanic system.
Analyses of the spatial power spectrum suggest that the
Magellanic Bridge, historically considered to be a single
coherent feature, may in fact be a projection of two
kinematically and morphologically distinct structures,
possibly representing two arms of the Small Magellanic Cloud
(SMC). The more turbulent southern parts of the Bridge
appear to show structure organised similarly to the adjacent
SMC, while the northern regions are shown to be relatively
deficient in a large scale power. The modifications to the
spatial power index by velocity fluctuations and the
turbulent component are also highly variant across these two
regions, where the northern part is significantly more
affected by slower velocity perturbations than is the
southern part.

We also probe the rate of variation of the HI spectra
throughout the Bridge, by measuring the Spectral Correlation
over selected subsets. The Spectral correlation algorithm is
shown to be more sensitive to low-power structural
variations than is the Fourier transformations used for the
spatial power spectrum, and the results from this analysis
highlight a tendency for the spectra of bright parts of the
HI in the Bridge to have a more persistent correlation along
a direction towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and
SMC. We attbribute this arrangement of structure to the
large-scale tidal processes active during the evolution of
the Magellanic Bridge.